Words Co-occurrence in Titles of Publications from the Arts Academic Community

Abstract

The title is considered the most important component of an academic publication, as it often communicates the research object, its scope, methods, and objectives. Objective: This study examines various properties related to the titles of articles, books, and book chapters—both single- and multi-authored—produced by the academic arts community in Minas Gerais (MG). The corpus includes publications with at least one author affiliated, between 2013 and 2023, with a postgraduate arts program (PPG) in the state of MG. Methodology: The methodology employs network analysis, focusing on statistical and topological properties related to word co-occurrence. Key features such as connectivity, centrality, and distributivity, as well as title length, were analyzed. The co-occurrence network analyses focused on titles of publications written in English. Results: Regarding the variety of languages, out of 7484 publications, 85.5% were in Portuguese, 8.74% in English, and 5.76% in other languages. The characterization of word co-occurrence in titles, based on normalized repeated and parallel edges, shows 17.45% of repeated and parallel words in sequence. These repeated and parallel edges occur more frequently in multi-authored publications compared to single-authored ones and in articles, chapters, and books, respectively. Based on the ratio between word types and word tokens in the titles, the vocabulary diversity rate is 47.6% for articles, 58% for chapters, and 75% for books. Conclusions: Greater autonomy in authorial decision-making was observed in book titles compared to academic articles and chapters, which are more constrained by editorial policies. The findings suggest an increase in coercion exerted by the group or sub-group within the academic community concerning specific phenomena or topics. Conversely, multi-authored article titles tend to reflect a distributed authorial activity (a "group mind"), characterized by an increase in both the number of words and lexical variety in the research terms.